Hard drive reliability at scale

This week Adam talks with Andy Klein from Backblaze about hard drive reliability at scale.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members get a bonus 15 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

• DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
• Sentry – See the untested code causing errors - or whether it’s partially or fully covered - directly in your stack trace, so you can avoid similar errors from happening in the future. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
• Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
• Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You iterlly can’t get any faster!

Featuring:

• Andy Klein – Twitter, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022
• 10 Stories From 10 Years of Drive Stats Data
• Hard Drive Life Expectancy
• The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Review
• SSD 101: How Reliable are SSDs?
• Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte
• A Behind the Scenes Look at Our US East Data Center
• Sean Has a New Friend. His Name Is Guido.
• The Storage Pod Story: Innovation to Commodity

We love 45Drives. If you need an intro to them, let us know.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:45) - Sponsor: DevCycle
(04:32) - Start the show!
(07:01) - 10 stories from 10 years
(14:39) - Software at the storage layer
(17:18) - S.M.A.R.T. predictive analysis
(20:49) - Digging into S.M.A.R.T. stats
(24:08) - Causes of High Fly Writes
(25:00) - Collecting and storing S.M.A.R.T. data
(29:10) - Sponsor: Sentry
(33:19) - Many DCs around the world
(37:24) - Burn-in testing
(40:45) - Dollars per failure and leveraged buying
(43:35) - The Backblaze Storage Pod
(51:13) - Storage servers are HEAVY!
(57:11) - 52Us, 12 high @ 150lbs each
(59:34) - Sponsor: Postman
(1:03:12) - How does backblaze buy drives?
(1:09:12) - Determining the size of the drive
(1:12:08) - What is your capacity/usage limit?
(1:14:39) - How should homelabers buy drives?
(1:25:43) - SSDs as boot drives
(1:30:41) - HDD vs SSD cost
(1:33:26) - How Adam buys drives
(1:36:20) - Closing out the show
(1:38:26) - Outro

Episode source